Alex heaved a sigh and looked out into the blue sky, flecked with cloud.
Maybe he was getting old and grumpy. Maybe the spark was going out of him. Or still worse – maybe he was turning into the sort of reactionary DI no newly qualified police officer wanted to work with. How long could you carry on being known as a legend if you didn’t deliver the goods? How long could you live on your reputation?
He shuffled the papers on his desk. Fredrika had just rung from Umeå to confirm that Sara Sebastiansson had been lying about when she first knew she would be staying at the course centre after her friend left. Alex frowned. It was depressing that Sara was lying about her Umeå links. He felt the anger flare in him. He would go out to his car and go round to Sara’s himself. He didn’t give a damn that she was suffering the deep hurt of bereavement. She was obstructing the work of the police, and that could never be permitted. No matter how distressed a person felt.
Then Alex retreated into his room again. Sara hadn’t really lied about her links to Umeå, she’d lied about one particular detail. A detail she had thought she could conceal from the police, but which the police, by contrast, believed to be an important piece in the jigsaw. The team had been working on the assumption that something happened in Umeå which decided the future course of Sara’s life, but that must be at least partly wrong. Something must have happened before Sara went on the course that summer, something Sara had tried to remedy by staying away longer.
And now she was being punished for it by someone murdering her child. Possibly the person she had claimed she had to see that day.
Alex rooted through his papers to find the horrible pictures of the dead Lilian. Why had someone marked her with the word ‘Unwanted’? Why had someone decided she was a child no one wanted? And why had she been found outside A &E? Was the location important? Could she just as well have been dumped somewhere else in Umeå? Or in any old town?
Alex fidgeted uneasily. The obvious question was whether the next body would also turn up outside Umeå hospital.
Alex tried valiantly not to think about the missing baby. He hoped Fredrika’s interview with the Jönköping woman’s grandmother would produce something. And he hoped they would soon find the mysterious Monika Sander. Without her, everything for the moment looked pretty hopeless, he was afraid to say.
He got to his feet with fresh resolve. A cup of coffee was what he needed. And he must shake off all this anxiety. If he was already speculating about where the next dead child would be found, then he had lost the battle.
Peder Rydh had slept incomprehensibly well the previous night. He and Ylva hadn’t had much to say to each other when he got home just after ten. The boys were asleep, of course. He stood at the end of one of their beds, watching the sleeping child. Blue monkey pyjamas, thumb in mouth. A slight twitch in his face; was he dreaming? Peder gave a wan smile and ran a gentle hand across the boy’s forehead.
Ylva asked questions about the second missing child, and he gave minimal answers. Then he had a glass of wine, watched TV for a while, and went to bed. Just as he put out the light, he heard Ylva’s voice in the darkness.
‘We’ve got to have a proper talk one day, Peder.’
At first he said nothing.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ she continued. ‘We’ve got to talk about how we feel.’
And then for the first time he told it like it was:
‘I can’t take any more. I just can’t.’
And he added:
‘I don’t want this to be my life. No way.’
He was turned towards her in the bed as he said it, and despite the darkness he saw her face fall and heard the change in her breathing. She was waiting for him to go on, but he had nothing more to say. Then he fell asleep, strangely relieved but not a little concerned by the fact that he felt nothing. No regret, no panic. Just relief.
In the car on the way to work, he tried to think clearly about the abducted children case.
Initially his thoughts were distracted by remembering that he hadn’t rung Jimmy to say he wouldn’t be able to come and see him as planned. They would have to have their posh cake with marzipan another day, because Peder was busy. How much Jimmy understood of what Peder told him was always hard to gauge. His brother seldom got the subtler points in conversations, and Jimmy related to time in an entirely different way to other people.
There was something nagging at the back of Peder’s mind, something he’d overlooked. Some simple but crucial detail that had vanished out of his head. The newspapers had dutifully printed Monika Sander’s name and picture and said she was wanted by the police. The identikit drawing was published again, along with a passport photo taken some 10 years before. Alex and Peder had asked themselves whether it was a good idea to publish the old photo they had got from Monika’s foster mother. It bore little resemblance to her current appearance and there was a strong risk that all sorts of people from her past would dash to the phone to report things from a time that had no bearing on the life she was living now. They were also aware of the need to share every last scrap of information they had. The investigation could not afford any more gaps in its knowledge. Monika Sander had to be dragged into the open – at any price.
Peder had spoken to Alex that morning. Nobody had rung in with any sensible information to date. Peder felt a sudden weariness and dejection. How far did they really think they were going to get with an ancient photo, a useless identikit drawing and a name that Monika Sander might not even use any longer?
Then it suddenly came back to Peder what he had overlooked when they released the information about Monika. He parked outside HQ and rushed up to the department.
Alex had just come back to his room with a cup of coffee when Peder came hurtling through the door.
Alex hardly got his ‘Good morning’ out before Peder started.
‘We’ve got to issue a double name,’ he gabbled.
‘What are you talking about?’ asked a bewildered Alex.
‘Monika Sander,’ Peder blurted. ‘We’ve got to ring the tax people and find out what her name was when she first came to Sweden. She was adopted, wasn’t she? She might have found out the name she was born with and be using it as an alias or something.’
‘Well we’ve already gone public with the name Monika Sander, but…’
‘Yes?’
‘I was just going to say that it’s a very good idea, Peder,’ Alex said evenly. ‘Get Ellen on the case; she can ring the tax office.’
Peder dashed out of the room and sprinted off in the direction of Ellen’s room.
Alex gave a wry smile. It was amazing to see a human being with that much energy.
In another part of Stockholm, two people with considerably less energy than Peder Rydh were also busy. Ingeborg and Johannes Myrberg were down on their hands and knees at either end of their large garden, weeding conscientiously between the shrubs and flowering plants. The rain had kept them from any sort of work in the garden until now, but at least summer seemed to have arrived. Admittedly there were a few clouds loitering around the sun, but as long as it was still shining and shedding its warmth, Ingeborg and Johannes Myrberg were more than happy.
Ingeborg took a quick glance at her watch. It was almost eleven. They had been out there for nearly two hours. Without a break. She shaded her eyes with her hand and looked across to her husband. Johannes had had a few prostate problems in recent years and was usually hurrying off to the toilet all the time. But not this morning. No, this morning they had both worked on undisturbed.
Ingeborg’s face broke into a smile as she watched her husband weeding round the rhubarb. They still took a childlike delight in their domain. In their heart of hearts, they had never really believed the house would be theirs. So many properties had passed them by. Either they were too expensive, or they turned out to have mould in the basement or damp patches on the ceilings.